[Info-vax] Where is EISNER:: and who funds it?

[alanfe...@gmail.com]

On Saturday, January 1, 2022 at 12:14:40 AM UTC-5, Galen wrote:
> alanfe... at gmail.com <alanfe... at gmail.com> wrote: 
> > On Friday, December 31, 2021 at 6:17:24 AM UTC-5, Jan-Erik Söderholm wrote: 
> >> Den 2021-12-31 kl. 11:43, skrev Simon Clubley: 
> >>> On 2021-12-28, alanfe... at gmail.com <alanfe... at gmail.com> wrote: 
> >>>> On Tuesday, December 28, 2021 at 7:21:29 PM UTC-5, Jan-Erik Söderholm wrote: 
[...]
> The trend on c.o.v. these days seems to be toward hypercriticality no 
> matter what the specific subject. 

Yep. Probably in part because no one wants to be shown to be wrong and be greatly embarrassed and humiliated in public. There is then the inevitable consequence of wanting to save face. Hence the "hypercritically." 

Not convinced it's a recent trend. Seems like the same old cov, more or less, that it was back when I was a more active participant -- before my long hiatus from it. In fact, maybe it was even worse then!!! Many here will remember a couple of extra nasty people from back then! One of them frequently called people "shit for brains." That's an exact quote. I am not making this up.

[Actually there is an exception to that. I recall getting it wrong on the Monty Hall Puzzler. So I made some little props for the car and such or somehow did the thing "experimentally" on paper. I quickly came to the conclusion that it actually _is_ better on average to switch to the other door. I was actually excited and happy about that! It was such a fascinating finding! I even ran up to my advisor's office to explain it to him. He had also gotten it wrong! Of course no one attacked me over it. But I haven't seen much if any of that here. And Richard Dawkins gives an example where some biologist spent half of his life studying some aspect of life that he thought did or didn't exist (sorry, I can't recall which or even what). Then some young biologist came on the scene and showed how totally wrong the old guy was. The old guy took it quite well. Wasn't upset at all, and congratulated the young guy. The audience broke out in applause, and tears were shed. But I know a story first-hand where some poor unfortunate presenter showed a really awful PID plot, and secretly all the physicists in the room were mocking the presenters. "What a bunch of garbage!" I heard later. At least they didn't yell out nasties at the talk. I think that does happen at times though. Anyway . . . ]

> And topic drift is endemic. 

Yep. I asked where EISNER:: was and who pays for it. It took like a dozen posts about it being at a co-location and a discussion about co-locations before I got an actual answer to "where?", and probably several dozen more before I got the answer to "who?" Simple questions. And KUDOS!!! to VSI for funding it! I am grateful.

Somehow we got into the pros and cons of having a company host your stuff. Someone made a simple observation (I think it was in two separate posts) that Google and some other hosting companies run their data centers at 80 deg. Someone said they suddenly realized it was 80 deg. _Fahrenheit_ (what a surprise!) and made a snide remark about the Fahrenheit scale, and it quickly decayed from there. 

Yes, maybe I should have stayed silent. But I've been in discussions about units before and just wanted to strai... -- uh -- clarify things. Sorry. Maybe I should have let it pass. I didn't think it would get this out of hand. I've done this before in other forums without any nasty responses. In fact, maybe no responses at all in most cases. But not here! (Maybe a nasty response in Quora.com. I don't recall for sure. But nothing like the piling on I got here.)

Yes, there will be topic drift.

> Far too many 
> veer off into politics. Egos are constantly on display as well. 

Well, I stayed out of that one until I was directly hit by it.
 
> Get over yourselves, folks. I won’t name anyone. You ought to know who you 
> are. The rest of us do.

People want to save face. I suppose maybe it's better to pretend you're a celebrity and just ignore the hate mail, hateful tweets, unfair attacks and criticisms and the like. But this is face-to-face in-your-face out-in-public nastiness.

Wow, some welcome I get after returning from a long hiatus. So be it. Actually I opened with another question and it went much better than this one did. OK.

Alan